The Adventures of Messy Cow, by Weng Chen

Summer is here, and I’m scared!

For a long time, summer didn’t matter to me. It’s just ordinary, occasionally hot days added up for a month or two. The chores, the vacations, the struggles, they were invisible and irrelevant.

Now every day started with the kids waking me up violently by opening our bedroom door with a loud slam and diving into our bed headbutting my chin, followed by the daily negotiations of eating one more bite of the egg or watching 5 or 10 minutes of TV.

But no matter how exhausting the mornings went, I knew, that it would all end at 8:50 when they picked up their bags and got out of the house. Preschool saved lives.

Until summer is here. I didn’t adjust my mindset and behavior for the first couple days, and it was terrible. I went all out too early, at 9 o’clock I already ran out of my mental and physical energy. My body was all ready for the next peaceful 4 hours only to realize that I needed to keep going for the rest 9 and half hours, for the next 70 days.

This isn’t the first time. But because of my lack of motivation to plan and procrastination, even I knew it was coming, I didn’t want to face it and let it catch me off guard.